Meson: A Next-Gen Build System Showing Promise

Meson is a new, open-source build system under development showing good results over the likes of SCons.

Meson is self-described by its developers as a "project to create the best possible next-generation build system." Meson is written in Python 3 and is designed to be high-performance while still being easy-to-use.

Those wishing to play around with Meson or learn more can find its code on GitHub along with the project site.

Meson is being brought up this weekend as its developers experimented with building Mesa 3D using Meson. The information about Meson building Mesa was shared on the Mesa-dev list. Mesa was targeted by Meson developers as being a real-world, complex code-base and "it seemed like an interesting challenge as it has lots of code generation and other unorthodox stuff."

The build time was shorter with Meson compared to Mesa's SCons support while the no-op build time was significantly better with 4.7 seconds for SCons while just 0.04 seconds for Meson. The results seem impressive and it will be interesting to see how other developers respond to Meson versus other build systems.

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the web-site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience and being the largest web-site devoted to Linux hardware reviews, particularly for products relevant to Linux gamers and enthusiasts but also commonly reviewing servers/workstations and embedded Linux devices. Michael has written more than 10,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics hardware drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated testing software. He can be followed via Twitter and Google+ or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.